


For a Single Yesterday

by merrin



Category: Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Epistolary, M/M, Synthesis Ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-16
Updated: 2020-06-16
Packaged: 2021-03-04 05:13:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,826
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24748156
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/merrin/pseuds/merrin
Summary: “You have to be fine,” he says, but doesn’t put in the message. He sticks it in the outgoing queue. No hails from Shepard before they’d escaped the local cluster. No telling exactly what that wave of green energy had done, if there had even been any ships able to go back and look for him.Not knowing anything is the most frustrating thing of all.There’s no telling how long it’ll be before they’re connected to any kind of network again, if ever. Maybe he’ll die of old age on this planet while Shepard searches the galaxy for them. At least Shepard would have survived to search.
Relationships: Kaidan Alenko/Male Shepard
Comments: 14
Kudos: 42





	For a Single Yesterday

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from "Me and Bobby McGee" by Janis Joplin. "I'd trade all my tomorrows/For a single yesterday."

Joker had named their temporary completely uncharted home “Lame Jungle Planet” and because no one could come up with anything better, it stuck. Joker’d even entered it into the star charts that way, for when they get the Normandy operational again, and on the off chance the system they’re in is anywhere close to a relay. 

Kaidan puts it in a message to Shepard that night.

_18 March, 2188, 21:00 (ship time)_

_Most of us are calling it LJP, except for James who calls it El Jeep. Tali is up to her elbows in engine parts, along with Adams, Daniels, and Donnelly. You’d be proud of Donnelly, I think. Hooking up with Daniels is the best thing that’s ever happened to that mouth of his. Too busy kissing her to even think about harassing someone else. We’ll get this old girl up and running in no time._

_Me? I think about kissing all the time. Kissing you, obviously, which I can’t wait to do when we get off this planet. Because we will. And we’ll find you. And you’ll be fine._

“You have to be fine,” he says, but doesn’t put in the message. He sticks it in the outgoing queue. No hails from Shepard before they’d escaped the local cluster. No telling exactly what that wave of green energy had done, if there were any ships able to go back and look for him. Kaidan had been stuck with Chakwas in the medbay after having a tank roll over on him, but he knows Joker stayed till all the other ships had left, scanning for Shepard. He knows because EDI told him, and he knows Garrus is the one that finally convinced Joker to leave. If it had been Kaidan on the bridge, if it had at all been up to him, they never would have left. Maybe they’d be a smear in a slowly decaying orbit above Earth, but knowing for sure might have been worth it.

Not knowing anything is the most frustrating thing of all. 

There’s no telling how long it’ll be before they’re connected to any kind of network again, if ever. Maybe he’ll die of old age on this planet while Shepard searches the galaxy for them. At least Shepard would have survived to search. 

\-- 

_22 March, 2188, 10:20_

_Somehow your fish survived the crash landing. I’ve never looked too closely at it but I guess it’s got mass effect fields holding it in place? I would not have assumed that much water could be contained while Joker “drifted like a leaf on the wind.” (His words, obviously.)_

_I’m feeding them for now, but we’ll run out of fish flakes soon. I’ll have to get with one of the botanists and see if we can find an acceptable substitute on LJP. Wouldn’t want to kill the fish now after all the work Kelly did to keep them alive._

It occurs to Kaidan as he types that Kelly Chambers is probably dead now, burned into reaper tech along with everyone else stuck on the Citadel when the reapers stole it. He knows nothing about her except that she kept Shepard company when he could not, and maybe it’s on Shepard’s behalf he feels sad for her now. He hopes there are more folks out there to remember her than just him and these fish. 

\--

Chakwas spends most of her time on LJP trying to figure out exactly what the Catalyst did to them. Kaidan doesn’t feel any different, but everyone’s walking around with the same digital green aura around them and EDI talks about being alive, and clearly things aren’t exactly the same. 

Unfortunately, the Normandy doesn’t have the necessary equipment to really break down what’s happened on a molecular level. 

Still, some changes are obvious. 

_4 May, 2188, 15:00_

_DID YOU KNOW ROBOTS CAN GET PREGNANT NOW?_

\--

_4 May, 2188, 20:15_

_Apparently it’s not really pregnancy but not really not pregnancy. I have no idea what she’s cooking in there, Shepard, but it’s not a steak dinner._

_You should see Joker, he is in turn super proud and scared shitless and it’s a combination I didn’t think I’d ever see on his face. I overheard him asking Chakwas the other day if Vrolik’s disease was something he could pass on to a robot baby. She didn’t think so, but who knows? What a brave new world you’ve opened up for us, John._

_EDI doesn’t have stretchable skin, per se. She “acquired” some parts of the hull that she promises aren’t necessary to the rebuild and made herself a pregnant belly from them. I’m glad I didn’t have to watch that process, but watching her waddle around now is pretty cute, actually._

_I don’t have her neural processors, it’s gonna take me a while to get used to being Uncle Kaidan to something that might need to plug itself in at night, but I’m up for the challenge. And don’t worry, I’ll tell him or her all about their Uncle John. Uncle Shep? I’ll leave that up to you._

\--

Liara comes to him first with the idea to update the memorial wall with the people they’d lost. They have the fabricator running to build new ship parts and it’s just a few keystrokes to get it printing nameplates instead. Where he draws the line is putting up Shepard’s name. 

She tries to tell him what everything had looked like as the Catalyst triggered, how everyone had left until it was just them in the Normandy, desperately scanning for his signature. How they hadn’t found it. 

She tries to, but he refuses to listen. 

_16 June, 2188,00:20_

_I don’t understand it. We don’t even know if you’re—well. If you’re dead. I can’t think like that. I can’t think we’ve known each other for so many years and if you’re—if you’re gone we only got this. This time we spent chasing down every faction in the galaxy to get them to cooperate._

_Don’t get me wrong. I’d rather have had any amount of time with you than none at all. Maybe we weren’t ready for each other before Horizon. Walking away from you was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, but I know it was right._

_Shepard, you’re this monolithic force in this galaxy. I think it started even before Saren and Sovereign. You had friends. You had people that loved you. You had people that worshipped you. And yeah, you had people that tried to get in your way and stop you from doing everything you needed to do to save their damn lives. But you needed someone to ground you. Not a moral compass, you have one of those. Is it too self-serving to say a guiding light? It probably is. But maybe by the time you read this you’ll indulge me._

_So maybe we did get together just exactly when we were meant to, but I can’t help but think we deserve more time together than that._

\--

_18 August, 2188, 06:05_

_James decided what we really needed was some more downtime because apparently none of us are getting enough while stuck on this planet. He’s setting up a poker tournament and saying no is not an option, or so Tali was told._

_I’ve been giving her tips and I can’t promise the geth programs that live in her suit now aren’t writing some sort of cheating code. It would serve James right to lose to her._

_Daniels and Donnelly told the story of first meeting you on the SR-2, how they’d challenged you to a hand of Skyllian 5. It amuses me, picturing their faces as you cleaned them out. I told them if they practiced they’d maybe beat you someday, but that didn’t seem to light the fire of competition like I expected._

_It’s no-stakes poker. None of us have access to our accounts out here, disconnected from the network as we are. I apologize in advance that all of these messages are gonna pop in at once. The winner gets to stand in front of everyone while the person of his (or her) choice tells him (or her) that they’re an amazing poker player slash genius. Where he comes up with this stuff, I’ll never know._

_I think he fabricated a trophy of some kind, but I haven’t seen it yet._

\-- 

Kaidan’s down in the valley, collecting water from the spring Chakwas has approved for their use with James, who he is absolutely using for the heavy lifting. In the absence of a Krogan, definitely choose the most ripped human. 

James is allergic to silence, apparently, and asks Kaidan questions most of the way down about what Shepard “had been like.” 

“Why do you keep talking about him in the past tense?” Kaidan finally asks, stopping on the trail. 

“Why don’t you?” James counters. 

“What if he’s not dead? How do we know anything, stuck out here? What if he’s not dead and we’ve all moved on?” 

James shrugs. “Then we get a happy surprise.” 

Kaidan turns back down the trail with a scoff. “That’s not how it works.” 

He feels James’s big hand on his shoulder, pulling him back. “Hey Kaidan, amigo, that’s exactly how it works. We accept the new SOP and we roll with it, because that’s what we gotta do.” 

Kaidan shrugs his hand off. “I can’t.” 

Joker’s voice comes over the comms. “Uh, Major?” 

“Go ahead.” 

“Kaidan, we just got the network back.” 

_8 September, 2188, 15:45_

_We still needed the water, so I had to go get it, but I’ve never made it back up the mountain that fast before. All this sitting around, fighting for survival has really done a number on my stamina._

_Yes, I can actually hear you making a joke about that._

_I haven’t even seen Liara since we got the net back, she’s got every single monitor in her room fired up, checking on all of her agents. She says she’s got some blank spaces in her network now, some gaps between links. She’s organizing what’s left, gathering information, figuring out how best to deploy._

_All of my messages have been delivered. I searched the net for news of you but it sounds like you just disappeared. They’ve stopped searching, I don’t know why they’ve stopped searching._

_Liara can’t find any word about you. She found your body floating in space after months. If she can’t find you now, with the network she has at her disposal . . . I just don’t know._

\-- 

The Reapers arrive before food becomes a concern, which is good because nothing on the planet was truly edible, though it wouldn’t have harmed any of them except Garrus and Tali. It might have been fun to chew something for a change instead of just sucking down the emergency rations of nutrient paste, but there’s no telling what it would have done to the fragile ecosystem that existed in the human intestine. 

_15 September, 2188, 22:45_

_Or so Chakwas explained to James for about two hours the other day. He really wanted to try frying up the eggs of this flying lizard we found, but she wouldn’t let him. The biologists will have a field day trying to classify that one, by the way. Joker suggested calling it a dragon, even labeled it so on the vid he took, but I doubt it’ll stick._

_I’m burying the lede, though. Reapers! We read on the net that they were changed along with the rest of us, that they’d been helping clean up and rebuild. Still, it was all we could do not to open fire when they appeared in the sky. I’m sure more than one serviceman had to go change his pants after. It was a near miss for me._

_They fixed the relay in this system, which is what brought the network back. Should have figured we’d see them sooner or later. They’re giving rides to mechanics and scientists and a bunch of people who can help with those of us stranded, so we really will get the Normandy back up and running within the week._

_Then I can help search._

\-- 

They leave LJP as soon as the Normandy is space worthy. It’s a few days' travel at sublight to get to the relay, and Kaidan spends most of his time on the bridge with Joker and EDI. Joker doesn’t like to take his eyes off the controls when he’s flying and EDI’s too logical for pity. Still, listening to her talk about Shepard like he’s already dead is easier than the rest of the crew avoiding the subject altogether.

Since the network came back, he’s gotten good at telling when he’s interrupted a conversation about him, reading the tension in the sudden silence when he walks into a room. The careful way that no one, not even Liara, will say Shepard’s name around him anymore. 

_25 September, 2188, 23:45_

_It doesn’t make sense. They have access to the same information I have, and nothing is confirmed. No one has found you. They’ve found the mechanism, the awful choice you had to make, but they haven’t found you. And if they haven’t found you, there’s no proof. The opposite of sight is faith, John, and there’s nothing in this galaxy I have more faith in than you._

\-- 

Kaidan installs the fish tank in the quarters they assign him on Earth. The Citadel still orbits above London while governments debate on whether to leave it as a memorial or put it to its intended purpose again. 

Hackett assigns Kaidan to a dozen diplomatic missions, so he hires someone to come by and keep the fish alive. It’s laughable to think he’s the most prominent of Shepard’s squad, but he’s the second human spectre and that plays well on the video feeds. 

_13 October, 2188, 23:50_

_You are, of course, the face of victory. Humans get to pretend to chalk up a win even while I give speeches about how this was really the galaxy’s win. Hackett’s happy as long as I’m smiling, but what I’m really doing is searching for news of you._

_You weren’t on the Citadel, they’ve mostly got that cleaned up already. They set Anderson to float amongst the stars. We missed his service, but I watched a recording. They quoted that old poem,_ “I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.” _He’d have hated all the fuss._

_I saw Wrex, on Tuchanka. Did you know they’ve built a statue of you? It’s in that courtyard outside the tower, you know, where we dodged all of those brutes and the reaper legs? The last place you saw Mordin. I wish I’d gotten to know him. I’ve listened to a few of the recordings he left in the lab, such a fascinating mind. Good singer for a Salarian._

_They built him a statue too. Wrex says they’re both memorials. I’m no good at reading expressions on his face, but when I told him no one had ever confirmed your death he looked . . . tired. Worried? Is the combination of tired and worried pity? I don’t know anymore._

\--

Liara meets him at the spaceport when he goes to Thessia. The car takes them past where they’d fought so hard to reach the Temple of Athame, and Liara points out how they’ve left it in ruins for now. “Purposefully,” she says. “I’m told it’s a reminder of the dangers of secrets.” 

Kaidan doesn’t know what to say to that, so he doesn’t say anything. It might be easy, or satisfying, to blame the Asari for what happened, for hiding their beacon, for using it to so handily outpace the development of the rest of the galaxy. But the reapers were always going to come, and at the end of the fight the Asari hadn’t been any more prepared than anyone else. 

Their population in the diaspora and some scattered groups in the less populated areas were all they had left, and while that left plenty of Asari, the loss still struck deep. Everyone’s losses did.

Liara’s silences have always been more comfortable than anyone else’s, and Kaidan doesn’t mind not breaking it until the car drops them off at her home. “I thought you would want to clean up a bit before meeting with the representatives from the surviving republics,” she says, showing him to the guest room. 

_9 November, 2188, 18:25_

_It’s weird, how quiet the planet is now. Still so sparsely populated, I guess. They’re importing new animals, growing some that had been here in tanks. But it’s a slow process. It’s nice to see progress though. People rebuilding._

_The meeting with the leadership was predictable. Everyone wants to talk about you, about how they’ll memorialize you. No one wants to talk about how to find you, where you might be._

_You are still out there, right?_

_I haven’t even checked if these are being opened or read. I haven’t wanted to. Either it’s you or it’s some creepy Alliance agent checking your personal communication. I want to know if it’s you, but I don’t want the hope if it’s not._

_Sometimes I get so angry I want to break something. Someone. The thought of you reading these and not answering because you can’t or won’t sucks. It sucks so much, Shepard. It sucks so much that I can’t tell if it’s better to believe you’re alive and you’ve moved on or you’re dead and no one’s reading these at all._

\--

_10 November, 2188, 01:20_

_It would definitely suck more if you’re actually dead._

\-- 

His next visit is to Rannoch, and he has dinner with Tali in the temporary shelter she’s placed on the plot of land she and Shepard claimed on that first visit. How she got food that wasn’t dextrose based on what amounts to a new frontier planet is beyond Kaidan, but he guesses as an admiral of the erstwhile migrant fleet she can pull a few strings. 

She regales him with stories about settled life, the children being born in this new generation who don’t need the strict filters on their suits. “When I think about them not even needing suits in a few generations,” she says. “Just a few! To be able to just feel the air on your skin any time you want to.” 

She shakes her head. “I’m glad it’s not me, I’ve gotten so used to not worrying about what my face is doing in conversations, I’d inadvertently insult someone every time I talked to them.” 

Kaidan laughs. “You could do the Shepard, full deadpan under all circumstances.” 

Tali laughs, but it’s not the full belly laugh she’s been doing. She lets it drift off into a brittle silence. “Liara says the Alliance wants to do a service for him,” Tali says quietly. 

Kaidan takes a sip of the lager he’d brought with him, smuggled carefully in a cool compartment in his locker. “Hackett told me.” 

“Liara also said the only reason they haven’t done one yet is because of you.” 

_17 December, 2188, 00:15_

_And another thing, were you going to tell me that you’d made me your next of kin on all your forms? That I have to okay your fucking funeral plans? That not a single decision gets executed in your will until I sign off on it? Your fucking mother is still alive, Shepard, how dare you leave this to me. How dare you go missing and leave me to decide when to declare you dead._

_Fuck you. God this is so unfair._

_I’m not picking your funeral music, you absolute fuck. Or I am, and it’s gonna be 20 minutes of Quarian flute music that Tali introduced me to and you are going to fucking hate it when you watch the feed. I’ll mix Krogan drums over whatever stupid synth music the Turians are into these days. I’ll have Joker stand there and beatbox over_ Amazing Grace, _you asshole. I’ll do it._

_The readings will all be done by the fucking Elcor from one of Tali’s romance novels._

_So help me god, I will do it. I will do all of it. Your funeral will be the dumbest, most ridiculous fucking thing anyone has ever seen and no one can stop it._

_No one but you._

_Please, god. Stop me._

\-- 

_17 December, 2188, 02:15_

_how do i keep going_

\-- 

He spends Christmas with Joker and EDI, mostly because they were the only ones to invite him to do anything. (They might actually be the only ones to celebrate it, now that Kaidan thinks about it.) 

Joker was still flying the Normandy, he joked that they could replace him, but he’s locked all his flight settings in place and he won’t tell anyone how to unlock them. They hadn’t really tried to replace him though. 

When they downtime at all, they like spending it on Earth.

_25 December, 2188, 01:45_

_They named the baby Bolts. Like nuts and. I think Joker named it, probably. I don’t even know how to properly classify it, but it’s already walking and talking and gets energy from the stars. From the stars, Shepard. It doesn’t need to eat or sleep._

_They’re easy to be around. Joker doesn’t want to talk about anything serious ever and EDI’s so matter of fact it’s hard to take offense or get sad about what she says. She just adjusts her expectations and moves on._

_She asked me if I’d talked to you, when I told her about the messages. I talk to you, but I haven’t heard from you, and I think she appreciates the distinction. At least one of us does._

\-- 

_1 January, 2189, 00:01_

_a year you’ll never see_

\--

His message inbox pings a minute later. Long enough that Kaidan’s heart leaps into his throat and soon enough that it could just be an automated mailing list, wishing him a Happy New Year on a calendar they should have abandoned long ago when they took to space.

_1 January, 2189, 00:02_

_****mail rejected, inbox full****_

Kaidan doesn’t regain conscious sobriety until the second week of January. 

\--

He takes leave in February and goes home to Vancouver. His mother welcomes him into the condo with open arms and warm cookies and he falls into her gratefully. His dad never came home. They’d identified his body in the city a few months after the war was over, while Kaidan was still stuck on Lame Jungle Planet. 

When he’d booked the trip, he’d pictured tears and commiseration and wallowing in self-pity, but that isn’t what he gets. 

He’d thought he’d be able to grieve with his mother, but she’s farther along her process and she had a body and a funeral and the ability to say goodbye. She loves him and she only wants to help him and if he has to dodge yet another call from her therapist, he won’t be held responsible for his actions. 

_12 February, 2189, 04:15_

_You know the shittiest part about grieving a war hero? There’s not a single goddamn populated portion of this galaxy we haven’t visited. I mean, we pulled Elcor off the homeworld, John. We saw where the Volus are from. I can’t go anywhere that people haven’t heard of you. Where I don’t remember something you did or said._

_There’s not a single corner of this galaxy I can get away from you, from people mourning you. Or Batarians celebrating your death, but that’s to be expected, I guess._

_Everyone wants to lay claim to you. Friends you never knew you had keep popping out of nowhere to tell a story about you. News sites talk about your childhood, people talk about affairs you couldn’t possibly have had because of where you were stationed at the time. Some woman claims you fathered her child, Shepard, and I KNOW that’s not possible._

_It’s like they all see these little pieces of you, one tiny puzzle piece and they think that using that, they can make the whole of you. But they can’t. You’re mine, not theirs. And I can’t, I won’t share you._

_The only people I want to talk to about you won’t do it right. I can’t do it when they look so sad for me. I need to talk about you but I don’t know to who. Or how. So I guess I’ll keep doing it here, with you._

_12 February, 2189, 04:16_

_****mail rejected, inbox full****_

He leaves a few days later, catching transport to the edge of the galaxy. He doesn’t care where.

\--

One month turns into two, turns into three. He’s gotten a few calls and pings from the team, and what he can’t ignore entirely he answers with single sentence messages. 

_18 March, 2189, 02:50_

_It’s been a year now. A year since I guess you died on the Citadel saving the galaxy. I guess I should say thank you, except I’m still so pissed. How dare you think it's somehow fucking noble to die without me, but expect me to live without you._

_18 March, 2189, 02:51_

_****mail rejected, inbox full****_

\-- 

_18 March, 2189, 03:15_

_shepard i’m so fucking grrateful the last thin i saidd was i lov/e you i meant it and istill do_

_18 March, 2189, 03:16_

_****mail rejected, inbox full****_

_\--_

_18 March, 2189, 03:17_

_im hpy its the lasst thing you sadi too_

_18 March, 2189, 03:18_

_****mail rejected, inbox full****_

\--

The Alliance owes him so much leave and back pay that there’s no way he’ll ever run out of either, but he’ll run out of systems to stop in before too much longer. He knows Hackett knows where he is, he’s taken no measures to hide his tracks. Maybe they’ll actually send someone after him for deserting, maybe they won’t care. He’s not sure if he wants to find out which. 

All he has to do now is decide if he wants to go back. To go back to being Kaidan Alenko, war hero, war widow, second (and now only) human spectre. 

Or, he could lose himself out here on the edge. He could buy a shuttle and keep flying into the black, just to see if it has an end. Just to see if, when he reaches the edge, he’ll find Shepard there. 

The thing that stops him is knowing how much Shepard would hate him throwing his life away like that. If there’s one thing Kaidan won’t do, it’s meet Shepard in whatever passes for a hereafter without a good fucking story about what he’d done with his life after Shepard. 

So eventually, he goes home. 

_22 June, 2189, 11:35_

_I never did say thank you. I know you, Shepard. Is that stupid? How do you thank someone for saving your life? Thank you?_

_You did so much more than save my life. You made me whole. This part of myself I hadn’t known was missing fell into place that afternoon on the Citadel, like coming home after a long deployment and finding the lights on, dinner in the oven. It’s a cliche, I guess, but there’s a reason things become cliches. It’s a thing everyone wants to find and I did. We did. For those months, what we had was perfect._

_And now I’ve lost it, and I can’t even fight for it, it’s just. Gone._

_You’re gone and you’re never coming back._

_So thank you. I’m grateful that I know what that feels like, and I’m grateful it was with you._

_22 June, 2189, 11:36_

_****mail rejected, inbox full****_

Kaidan deletes the pingback and opens a new message to Liara. 

It’s time. 

\-- 

Shepard hadn’t specified a location, so Kaidan decides to hold the memorial service in London. It’s the last place any of them had seen Shepard alive. 

Liara meets him before in the hotel he’d booked. London was still in the rebuilding phase and would probably be for the rest of Kaidan’s lifetime, but Liara might see it return to something of its former glory. 

She hugs him as she comes in and asks if he has any questions before they get started. “It’ll be like it was with Shepard and the beacons, right?” 

“Very similar,” she says. “It shouldn’t hurt like that did though, that was a lot of information to translate and process, and I have gotten better at it since then.” 

Kaidan has always assumed Liara to be the most emotionally mature of all of them. Wrex is older, to be sure, but Krogans carry an undercurrent of rage with them everywhere they went, and it’s hard to associate the impulse to bash everyone’s brains in with any kind of complex emotion. If he guesses, he’d say she wasn’t surprised to hear from him, or by his request. 

She doesn’t say “embrace eternity” like she had back on the Normandy with Shepard, which he had always thought of as a magic phrase to turn the melding on. 

She takes his shoulders in her small, capable hands, and bends her head toward his. With a deep, unsteady breath, he leans down to complete the contact. 

And what he learns is that Liara’s placid surface hides a deep sadness he can’t possibly explore the depths of. It’s not all Shepard, he can see Benezia there too, younger and prettier before the indoctrination. Nameless Asari lost forever as the reapers filled the sky over Thessia. There’s a rage there that she keeps tightly controlled, a desperate desire to raze everything to the ground in vengeance that will forever be kept unsatisfied, that will gnaw at her for years. 

The knowledge that she’ll carry all of them for centuries after their deaths, that she alone of their squad will survive, will tell their stories long after the rest of them find their place amongst the stars. 

He finally sees her there, or a manifestation of her. She’s wearing that science officer’s uniform she’d been wearing when they found her on Therum. He’s not sure what he’s wearing as he manifests, but it wouldn’t surprise him if it was his SR-1 fatigues. 

“I hadn’t thought about that,” he says. “I’m sorry.” 

She smiles softly, almost maternally. It makes Kaidan’s heart ache. “I want to be able to tell you we have grown used to this, to outliving our spouses from other races, our friends.” 

“But you haven’t,” he says. 

She shakes her head. “Some of us, maybe. Maybe I met you all too young, before I had my heart hardened toward loss. Maybe I would have always felt this way.” She shrugs, an entirely human gesture he knows she picked up from them. An image of Shepard floats between them, walking purposefully from one side of their dreamscape to the other. The sight arrests him, stops every bodily process in its tracks as his eyes follow Shepard across the landscape of their shared dream. Shepard turns toward him and smiles and the breath strangles in Kaidan’s throat. Tears prick his eyes and he blinks them away hurriedly, not wanting to miss a single moment of this apparition. 

Liara comes to stand by his side. “You do not need to forget him, or stop talking about him.” 

Kaidan doesn’t take his eyes off Shepard. “I don’t think I could if I wanted to.” Even in the dream, his voice chokes on the words. She shows him more moments, things she had seen but also things she couldn’t possibly have seen, things she must have gathered from the crew. Shepard’s eyes tracking him across the old comm room. A smile across the table in the mess that he’d never have read as flirtatious until he knew what Shepard’s flirtatious smiles looked like. The way Shepard’s whole body crumpled as Kaidan walked away on Horizon, and the conversation with Joker after. 

Tears drip down his face unchecked as Kaidan soaks in the gift Liara and his friends have given him, these moments he hadn’t even known existed.

The stream of images ends on a quiet moment, one Kaidan remembers. Liara had come to his room on the Observation deck and caught them in the very early stages of their mutually acknowledged love for each other. Nothing untoward, she’d just seen Shepard cuddled up to his back, pressed against the hull while they looked at the expanse of stars. Kaidan had been looking at the stars anyway, Shepard had apparently been looking at him. Kaidan’s face is serene and quiet, though he knows at the time he was focusing as much on Shepard’s warmth at his back as he was on the stars in front of him. 

Shepard’s face hurts to look at, but Kaidan does it anyway. It’s this amalgam of awestruck love and “how did I get this fucking lucky” and overwhelming relief and “finally.” Finally, he’s mine. 

He hadn’t been sure if he and Liara could touch in the mind meld, but she places her hands on his face, cupping her fingers around his wet cheeks. The last image of Shepard dissipates slowly, and as it fades he meets her eyes. “You will carry this grief for the rest of your life, Kaidan. But I promise that the weight will seem less as time goes on. And you will always have us to help you bear the load.” 

Behind her, shadowy outlines of the crew appear. All of their friends who had known and loved Shepard and by extension, him. 

“Who will help you?” 

She smiles, and Kaidan can see tears welling in her eyes too. “New friends,” she says. “My Asari sisters who understand and experience this loss with me. Wrex’s children. Tali’s, if she ever settles down and has any. EDI, who will carry on after all of us are gone. I have always been a historian, Kaidan. My comfort comes from dwelling on memory.

“You are a man of action. Shepard was too. Humans in general, I suppose, though I still have not met a wide enough sample to draw such a conclusion. This loss has had you acting contrary to your base instincts, stumbling you on your way forward.” 

“How do I fix it?” 

Her thumbs caress his cheeks, wiping away the tracks of . . . he guesses dream tears? “You have already begun the process,” she says and leans forward to kiss his cheek. “We’ll help you through the rest.” 

_4 July, 2189, 14:00_

_So I guess all that’s left is to say the thing I haven’t wanted to say, all this time. Part of unburdening myself of all the things left unsaid. Not I love you, because I’ve said that. Not I will never forget you, because even though I won’t, that’s a welcome burden._

_Goodbye, Shepard. Rest easy._

_4 July, 2189, 14:01_

_****mail rejected, inbox full****_

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to [swaps55](https://archiveofourown.org/users/swaps55) for the beta and for the general cheerleading and also for naming the planet they crashed on and writing one of the lines of this story for me. Much appreciated, babe.


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